Intercellular

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. occurring or existing between cells in biological tissue or organisms
2. situated in the spaces or gaps among adjacent cells
3. found in the regions separating one cell from another in living systems

Etymology: Biology needed a word for the spaces between the building blocks of living tissue, and "intercellular" was assembled from parts that were already in English. Its first element, "inter-", comes from Latin "inter", meaning "between" or "among," and it has been traced back to a very old Indo-European root. The second element, "cellular," is an English adjective from "cell," a word that originally referred to a small, enclosed room, as in a monastic cell or a prison cell. The two parts were joined by a simple process of word formation: the Latin prefix was attached to the English adjective, producing a term that means "lying between cells." The result is a technical coinage rather than a word with a colourful past, and its meaning follows its construction closely. The word therefore describes anything occurring in the gaps between cells, such as fluid, signalling or junctions in tissue.

Synonyms: between cells, cellular junction, cell-to-cell, interstitial, extracellular